Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [32]
Marsh very nearly smiled. “When I first started coming in, once they grew accustomed to me, they began to bring me their problems and disputes. Not that I mind—it’s part of what you might call the job—but it looked to dominate my visits here. So I let it be known that if they could catch me before I’d finished my first drink, I’d help them; otherwise they’d have to wait until my mind was clear. It’s become a sort of game between us. They’re considerably more scrupulous about following the rules than I am—I would have gone ahead with whatever is troubling Hendricks, but he’d have been uncomfortable.”
In his life as an itinerant scribe, Mahmoud had observed the Arab rules of hospitality with his clients, although in that land the rituals had centred around coffee rather than alcohol: When coffee ceased to be offered, or accepted, business was concluded. The unlikely parallel amused me; Holmes, however, was back on the scent.
“Does that rule apply to any guests you might bring here? Is our conversation now limited to record bags of grouse and the breeding lines of retrievers?”
Marsh shrugged—and even that was an English shrug, not the eloquent, full-shouldered gesture of Palestine. “I’ve not brought a guest here before. Other than my cousin,” he added, making it clear that Alistair was not guest, but family.
“In that case,” said Holmes, “I should like to ask how your nephew Gabriel was killed.”
The question took me by surprise. I had thought the cause behind Marsh’s tension when he pronounced the words Until my brother’s son Gabriel died was the upheaval that death had inflicted on the family, particularly on Marsh’s own future. Holmes, on the other hand, had traced the tension further back, to the boy’s death itself, and indeed, he seemed to have hit it on the head: The bleak, dying-man look settled back onto Marsh’s face; his right hand crept up to finger the scar on his face, which the sudden clamp of tension had drawn into a sunken gash. He drained his glass, looked around to catch the landlord’s attention, and waited until the next round was on the table. He ignored the beer, picking up the smaller glass and looking into it.
“They said, ‘died in service,’ ” he told us at last, but he had to throw the fiery contents of the small glass down his throat before he could get the rest of it out. “I think he was killed by a firing squad.”
I do not know which of his companions let out the sound, something between pain and disbelief, but it could have been any of the three of us—even Alistair, who must have heard the story before. Alistair squirmed in his chair and dug a pen-knife out of his pocket, eyeing the pile of logs on the hearth, but after a minute, he folded the knife away. Holmes slumped down into the hard chair and prepared to listen, fingers steepled over his waistcoat, eyes half closed and glittering in the firelight like those of an observant snake.
“I only began to suspect it a few weeks ago,” Marsh resumed. “My brother Henry had been ill for a long time before he died, so that I found his affairs in chaos. I have to say, Sidney did his best, but Henry tended to take back certain responsibilities, and then not carry through. There were unpaid feed bills from three years ago, notifications from the builders concerning urgent roof repairs set aside. Last month, among a collection of papers concerning the local hunt, I happened across an envelope with some things belonging to Gabriel. An identity disc, half a dozen field post-cards, a couple of letters addressed to Henry. And the death notifications.”
His fingers started to go back to the scar, then he caught the movement and changed it to run the hand over his face, rasping the stubble with his callused palm. “Have you ever seen an official notification? Of course you have; who hasn’t? Well, in the first years of the war the notifications of executions were apparently blunt to the point of being brutal. And to top matters off, they stopped the family’s pension payments. But after an awful lot of these came through the War Offices,